


"Their birth in grief and ashes."

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Daddy Issues, ElectraComplex, Explicit Language, F/M, Gen, Introspection, NovelCompliant, Unreliable Narrator, envy - Freeform, motherdaughter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 14:43:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15997373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "This is no church, it is no grave-yard. The grief here is as wide open as his own, stretching out across the cornfields, unsettling the chequered curtains and tying itself around the staircase her great-grandfather carved."Being a mother is hard, no, really.





	"Their birth in grief and ashes."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to MiaCooper for the quick and wonderful beta, she's brilliant at her job. A class A writer and class A editor. 
> 
> Yeah, there is no excuse for this. It's just how I like my Janeways; deeply complex and not at all nice.

* * *

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” - Cormac McCarthy, _The Road_

* * *

 

She remembers the soft, delicate feeling of that pale skin against her own. Freckles across a button nose, and eyes the colour of steel. Her husband’s eyes, adopting the same outlook as they grew and widened with the wonders of the universe.

Vast, and consuming, the wonders which stole her away. She wishes her joy, amongst the stars, and between the worlds she, herself, cannot know.

The worlds she despises.

Sometimes she looks out of the windows, the fields of corn dancing in the light of the pale Indiana moon, and the stars bait her, terrorise her. Remind her of what they’ve stolen.

The writers, the artists, the philosophers and musicians, treat them as benevolent wonders, as givers of light. But she knows them only as thieves, as arch-villains of time and of families.

She knows them as her tormentors.

So she will not sleep when they are here, she does not trust them not to take more from her.

***-***

“My first command.”

The smile says it all; curved with ambition, unsettlingly bright, fingers drumming on the perpetual coffee cup.

It doesn’t matter how many times she’s told her she shouldn’t drink so much of it, it doesn’t seem to register. Edward was always better at convincing her to curb her more addictive behaviours.

And at influencing her.

“Well done darling,” she touches her fingers to the com, to the line of her eldest’s face.

Sometimes she looks so like Phoebe, when she smiles, but at other times she is Edward’s daughter. She does not resemble Gretchen, though she has her colouring. That’s something.

“What does Mark say?”

She pauses for a moment, “Oh, he’s happy for me.”

Just as everyone should be.

***-***

They don’t tell Gretchen at first, what she’s gone through. Instead of bringing Kathryn home, where she should be, they keep her in the sterility of Starfleet Medical. She quietly pleads with Edward to intervene, but he refuses, though she sees it as agony dancing in his eyes.

And she never really finds out what happened to her daughter with the Cardassians, but she suspects. She suspects they took her daughter and put that steel in her jaw, and the ice in her eyes. They brittled her bones and they withered her.

It isn’t until she comes downstairs one night, unable to sleep after Edward comes home late, and finds Kathryn cradling a bottle of whiskey, cheek pressed to the window, eyes heavy with tears, that she actually understands.

“I have scars,” Kathryn tells her, and Gretchen can see them already.

***-***

She’s terrified for her, already, and she’s only twelve. She has no sense of danger, of what is out there to damage her. Curiosity and bravery is a dangerous mix, but with her daughter’s ambition and temper, it’s a fatal one.

“I was simply exploring,” she says indignantly, as Gretchen swipes disinfectant over the gash in her leg.

Blood drips onto the wooden floor, and she dreads the prospect of cleaning it. She already feels faint. The tangy, dense smell catches in her throat.

“Kathryn, your sense of adventure will get you in trouble,” she admonishes.

“Least I have one,” she answers, one untamed eye brow rising.

Gretchen doesn’t want to be hurt, but she is.

***-***

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kathryn says meekly, curling away from her.

The prom dress, a deep midnight satin, brushes against the grass as she sways gently, rocking her knees to make the old swing – which Edward strung up when Phoebe was just three – move. Her toes curl into the ground, those tiny silver high heels discarded, and she looks up at the stars.

“If you don’t want to talk, do you want me to stay?”

She nods, and a lock of her hair comes loose from the pile on her head, curling into her pale neck. She shuffles along on the swing and Gretchen settles beside her. Plumper, having carried two children, she doesn’t fit as neatly as her nearly adult daughter.

Hesitant, Kathryn dips her head to the side, reconsiders, lifts it again.

“It’s okay,” she mutters, and her daughter rests her head there.

“Men can be real asses,” Kathryn says.

“He wasn’t a man,” Gretchen says gently. “He was a boy.”

Kathryn laughs, low and dark in the back of her throat, and Gretchen is delighted.

“I think I’ll stick to myself from now on,” her daughter declares, but her voice trembles.

It trembles with youth, and dissatisfaction, and hope and all the things that romance bring and take simultaneously. She wants to tell her this, she wants to comfort her daughter the way a mother should, but she feels inadequate. She is not Edward, so she cannot. She doesn’t have the power.

And Gretchen thinks that’s a dangerous proclamation. And years from now, she will wish she had spoken. But the feeling of her daughter’s capitulation, and sudden neediness, glues her lips closed.

***-***

It’s selfish, she thinks, and knows. And yet she tries to haul the bucket out of Phoebe’s hands. The water splashes up onto her hand and wrist, and it’s so cold Gretchen gasps.

“You can’t.”

“Who can’t?” Phoebe thuds out of the kitchen. “She thinks she hurts most. She thinks it was only her. It was all of us.”

Gretchen stands, paralysed with indecision, and pinned by a strange sense of voyeurism, as her youngest sloshes a bucket of ice water over her eldest – a bundle of reeking pyjamas and covers that haven’t been changed in weeks – and Kathryn flies out of the bed, and almost for Phoebe’s jugular.

“You bitch,” Kathryn howls, sopping wet and incandescent with fury. “You utter bitch.”

Phoebe chucks the now empty bucket onto the swimming bed.

“You’re boring. And selfish. And so self-concerned. Get up. And fucking live.”

And so she does. She takes her sister’s edict – the one Gretchen was not brave enough to give – and lives. But the more she lives, the less she seems to be part of their lives.

***-***

He reminds her of Justin; dark, handsome, brooding. He’s broad and tall and threatening looking, and she wonders at how formidable they must have looked; her so little and fierce, him so massive and present. And she knows it. She smells his desperation and his love and his agony.

He smells like day-old whiskey.

“I don’t know why I am here,” he says, as soon as she invites him in.

She thinks she knows why he’s here; to find closure, to seek out peace. He’s in the wrong place. This is no church, it is no grave-yard. The grief here is as wide open as his own, stretching out across the cornfields, unsettling the chequered curtains and tying itself around the staircase her great-grandfather carved.

She could show him Kathryn’s room; a shrine, to a child who left her decades ago now. She could show him where she carved her name into the tree in the garden, or where she lay down once in foot-high snow and wished never to wake up.

But none of it would bring her back to either of them.

So instead they stand on the porch, and share a bottle of whiskey, and stare out into the depth of midnight.

“I don’t know why I came,” he repeats, as if it’s a question.

“I have photographs of her,” she suggests, as if they might help either of them.

“Please,” he says. “I’m frightened I will forget what she looks like.”

“It’s the last thing to go,” she says, from a place with a depth of experience so broad that the very recollection chills her to the bone.

“We had decided to pursue a relationship.”

“Mr Chakotay,” she says, “my daughter did not confide in me. I hope you aren’t here for secrets. I have none to give you.”

“No...” tears crackle his voice. “Just memories.”

***-***

At least her pain is not in isolation. Owen Paris sits in front of her, and the tremble of his shoulders and the set of his hard eyes betray him.

Whatever Kathryn saw in him is repulsive, though Gretchen knows exactly what shape it takes. He was, after all, Edward’s protege.

“Lost,” he murmurs. “Presumed dead.”

“Oh.”

Then they are quiet.

“But there is no proof.”

“Four years is proof enough.”

Owen’s eyes are glassy, and she feels a camaraderie with him that she is loathe to feel. Two troublesome – troubled – children, lost to the stars.

“I’ve lost Kathryn lots of times before,” she says, knowing full well Owen Paris cannot possibly understand. “This is just the final time.”

“I won’t give up,” he vows, as if it will make a difference.

“Thank you Admiral,” she does not look at him, she can’t.

***-***

It’s the kind of lust that terrifies Gretchen, that she has never possessed but that both her daughters have in spades. Kathryn thrums with it, and it takes all sorts of shapes; ambition, greed, cleverness, flirtatiousness.

“I don’t particularly like him,” Edward mutters, eyeing Justin as he takes Kathryn in his arms.

“School yourself a bit better Ed,” she suggests.

“He knows too much about her,” Edward says enigmatically, and Gretchen feels entirely out of the loop.

She knows it has something to do with Owen Paris and than damnable altercation with the Cardassians. And those purple bracelets around her wrists which have faded. And the scars which stripe her thighs, that Kathryn thinks she has managed to hide.

“It’ll pass.”

“Will it?” she asks, taking another sip.

“He’s nothing serious.”

“You’re very wrong,” she mutters. “I think it’s entirely serious. You better start pretending Ed.”

He huffs, and she casts her husband a sideways glance.

Nothing, she thinks, is ever good enough for the Goldenbird.

***-***

The tears have stopped. But Phoebe drops in every day, and badgers her to eat.

One day she finds her sitting in front of the fire, cradling one of the bottles of single malt she couldn’t part with in Edward’s absence, and vile drunk.

“Mom,” she groans, pulling her up to her feet and letting the bottle roll quietly to the rug.

“How do I go on?”

Gretchen sees the pain flash in her younger daughter’s eyes, and yet she cannot bring herself to amend her words.

“I can’t-”

“Oh fuck this,” Phoebe throws her back down. “Will I ever be enough for you?”

‘No’ nearly rolls off her tongue, but she stifles it, and sobs so hard she regains Phoebe’s pity.

***-***

She is paralysed with anxiety, as she presses into the shuttle at Headquarters. There is no space between the hundreds of friends and relatives, and there is a hum of excitement even Gretchen isn’t impervious to. She can feel Julia Paris’ eyes on her, but she refuses to make any glance in her direction. She’d much rather do this entirely alone. Because that’s always been the way of it.

They are going to meet them at McKinley. She will see her daughter for the first time in seven years. These things are abstract ideas, as opposed to realities. It’s all so organised and so calm.

Owen greets her with a deferential nod; she is, after all, the late and beloved (touted for the presidency before his untimely death) Admiral Janeway’s wife, and she still commands some sway in the Admiralty corridors of Starfleet.

“You kept your word,” she says quietly.

“It was the least I could do,” he murmurs.

She wants to acknowledge that nothing could wash Paris’ conscience clean, but one sideways glance at him shows he knows that entirely. So there’s no need to remind him.

“Tom is so different...” he murmurs. “And Katie-”

“Kathryn,” she corrects, eyes trained on the door through which they will come into the main area.

“Kathryn has done an incredible job,” he continues. “An incredible captain.”

“It’s in her blood,” she looks at him.

“Enjoy it Gretchen,” he says quietly.

“I will.”

She watches as the heavy doors slide open and they begin pouring out. And family push forward, and there are spouses crying and parents sobbing and children who were babies when their parents went on a three week mission.

The crowd thins out as the families take leave to grieve seven years alone, in the privacy of McKinley, which has been entirely taken over for the occasion.

And by the end she knows it is just the families of the command team – she recognises them from the annual gatherings they invite her to but she never attends – and there is more space than there are people.

Beside her, on a long bench which lines the room, is a beautiful, slender woman. Her black hair is hanging down her back, and she is waiting with the air of someone who is both intrepid and reserved.

“You’re Gretchen Janeway,” she says . “Kathryn’s mother.”

“I am.”

She nods, “I feel I know her.”

Gretchen looks at her and feigns a smile, “An impossible task.”

“Are you nervous?” the woman asks, and when she turns Gretchen notices the elaborate ink tattooed just above her temple.

“Unbearably,” she nearly sobs, but she doesn’t.

“Me too.”

The doors hiss open again and they come out – Kathryn very last, as if she doesn’t want to leave.

She looks the same, and so very different. Her hair is gone – that long hair Gretchen would brush the tangles out of – and her eyes are darker.

They are so dark, they are the same colour as steel.

The woman beside her stands up and runs into the arms of the First Officer, the Maquis who Kathryn took on, and then there are only two people left to embrace.

“Mom,” she breathes, dark coffee and sins and desperation, and as a mother Gretchen doesn’t know what else to do.

So she holds her, and weeps, and wonders if she’ll ever know this woman she has just met.

 


End file.
